On the Internet, content hosting websites or other applications allow users to upload, view, and share digital content. Such digital content may include audio clips, movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, pictures, photos, etc.
However, Internet users experience the Internet and these Internet-based applications differently depending on their connection speed, the quality of service of their Internet service provider (ISP), how interconnected said ISP is to the rest of the Internet, availability and load characteristics of application servers, and even the quality of the home network. Given the most common current measurements of ISP performance (e.g., download speed from a server typically geographically close and well interconnected to the user), consumers can be confused when their user experience does not meet the expectations created by a certain access network speed promised by the ISP.
Some metrics currently available attempt to address this issue by characterizing bandwidth available to the end user from a given ISP. However, the most popular of these metrics only measures a partial path, and is thus not fully representative of the application experience any given user could expect. Another technique for assessing application performance focuses on measuring particular application-specific characteristics. However, this type of metric is difficult to replicate, and, though it gives a numerical result that can be representative of the differential performance through a set of ISPs, it is generally difficult to translate to a user experience.